Kingdom of Monkeys

By Adam Lewis Schroeder

Charting the steamy jungles and murky depths of the South Seas, these stories dip into the lives of a Malay boy in 19th century Singapore, a Dutch painter in wartime Bali, and an opium-smoking porter in northern Thailand. In a brilliant reworking of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Coppola's Apocalypse Now, the closing novella tracks a martyr to his lair and reveals Kurtz alive and well and living among us. Cunningly exposing the tattered vestiges of colonial power in Asia, Schroeder reinvents the exotic, the exquisite, and the exiled. "Schroeder has a light, lucid touch; he resists ... heavy-handed condemnation of Western consumerism and ... goggle-eyed promotion of Eastern mysticism." -- Quill & Quire (Starred Review) "The texture and scents and colors -- the otherness -- of Indonesia, the Philippines, even 19th-century Singapore, shimmer on the page." -- Globe and Mail

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1551924048
• ISBN13: 9781551924045
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: Raincoast Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Stop sleepin on the Canucks!

This is a pretty damn nice debut. The story Many Many Elephants is probably worth about twenty bucks alone. we're boppin around Southeast Asia to britian and around the world in a hundred and ninety six pages. Bring on the Novel man!

Seductive, exotic, intriguing...

I had almost given up on short stories as a genre, but Adam Lewis Schroeder gives new hope in this collection of stories that are wildly different in location, theme and approach to most other collections I've read, and yet jive with my own experiences as a traveller and as a human being. He avoids the trappings of post-colonial guilt and instead focusses on relationships, memories, experiences and events in ways that made me feel I was there. The novella at the end is wonderful. More, please!